Overwatch: Competitive Play Testing
Overwatch, the newest Moba on the scene, is really giving players a fun experience in term of gameplay and sheer versatility in characters. The game has amassed over 10 million players in its short release time, that number increasing daily.
Now it’s getting ready to take the game one step further – introducing its competitive play.
Well that’s not exactly true, its ready to test its competitive play features out prior to them going live. The test being offered, for the PC only, offers a look into the competitive play features being offered. This newest update to the blizzard game will place you against similar ranked opponents once you take part in 10 placement matches. This will give gamers a chance to have some balance in terms of their gameplay, and not lose to opponents that are vastly superior to them again and again. The newest mod also includes a sudden death match for teams that end the game in a tie – ensuring that it will end in a manner as fairly as possible.
For those of you who quit early during a match that isn’t going well, be advised, there are stricter penalties for leaving or being idle during a competitive play match. You’ll find yourself unable to start any other matches while the previous one is still in progress, and repeated transgressions could find you removed from competitive play all together.
This update to Overwatch doesn’t only concentrate on the newly added competitive play feature, but also showcases some other fixes and changes made to the game. One important feature change is the removal of the “avoid this player” ability. The ability, until now, has given players the chance to effectively block out individuals from their gameplay that they didn’t want to play with. However Blizzard has come to realize that this feature has caused nothing but havoc with matchmaking results – for example: “… One of the best Widowmaker players in the world complained to us about long queue times. We looked into it and found that hundreds of other players had avoided him (he’s a nice guy–they avoided him because they did not want to play against him, not because of misbehavior).
“The end result was that it took him an extremely long time to find a match. The worst part was, by the time he finally got a match, he had been waiting so long that the system had ‘opened up’ to lower skill players. Now one of the best Widowmaker players was facing off against players at a lower skill level. As a result, we’ve disabled the Avoid system (the UI will go away in an upcoming patch). The system was designed with the best intent. But the results were pretty disastrous.”
Talk about getting the general populace to be afraid of you.
For those of you just getting into Overwatch, and those deeply entrenched already, get ready for some hardcore gaming. The competitive realm isn’t for the weak – so it’s time we all step up our gameplay.
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